Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Sunday, March 4, 2012

The Greatest Tweet Of All Time

At last, my prayers have been answered! Thank you, Jesus!

Break out the booze, boys, it's time to celebrate!

Megan McArdle is now on book leave!

Click to read the Good News!

McArdle's book will explain how failure leads to success, a field in which she has considerable experience. We look forward to the chapters on choosing the right womb, honing interview techniques by making girls cry in the rest room, and the use of shopping therapy to squash any inconvenient twinges of conscience. We expect that the central metaphor will be how five year olds must be able to play with spaghetti or we will end up with 80% less corporate innovation.

The only remaining question is, who will replace the irreplaceable McArdle? Who could ever fill her stylish yet affordable shoes?

The Atlantic is happpy to announce that an empty shirt will take the place of Megan McArdle, who is on book leave. We do not know whether she is writing or reading one.

I'll have to order the book from the library when it comes out. Say, didn't Glenn Greenwald write a bunch of books without giving up his blog for months?

And, more important, how many months are we talking about? Knowing McArdle's work ethic, pace and volumn of writing, it could be six months. Yet she will not need to bother with time-consuming things like research or thought, which is bound to save a few months.

And is the Atlantic paying her while she's gone? And does she have a deal with Kindle, which partners with The Atlantic?

MEGAN MCARDLEMegan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. She is currently on leave.MoreMegan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero â�¦ all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Susan's snark will be able to cut diamonds if she pays her any attention.

Also holy jesus that spaghetti video.

"Turns out that kindergarteners can complete a task better than most adults, because the kids don't operate under resource or management constraints which are present in literally every business or research project in the history of human endeavor. That's what makes it such an applicable metaphor."

And it's so fucking easy to make her point with actual, you know, intellectual concepts. She must know Hayek backwards and forwards because you don't get your glibertarian hack card without passing a Hayek test, right? His concept of "partial knowledge" is fairly applicable to why the kids succeed: each of them realizes something different about the design, and a trial-and-error process acts as a clearance mechanism to assemble all the individual realizations into a project that combines all of them at once. And the benefit of this explanation is that you don't have to rely on something as idiotic as "kids don't yet have the cognitive or social development to activate the constraints that all projects have to work within" to make your point.

And for fucks sake she drops like six different elite status-marker jokes ("the kids don't think yet that this will go on their Harvard transcript") in the space of two minutes. I literally can't believe this isn't some kind of put-on or live-action trolling.

I don't know if anybody else took the "Write like McMegan" contest seriously enough to write anything, but if you did you can email me - downpup@yahoo.com & I'll publish it if you don't have your own bog.

Right now, Mangu-Ward is running away with it, mostly because half her readers thought it was Megan's, but also because of the recipe she included.

Permission To Suck? Really? Wow, it's already a train wreck. Why wouldn't she just go with Permission To Fail? That's probably closer in meaning to her central theme anyway. Putting aside the obnoxiousness of the double entendre, does she not comprehend that there's a huge difference between failing and sucking?

I love the way Avik Roy says that if women don't have to pay for contraceptives they'll get the expensive designer contraception instead of the cheap WalMart contraception. Because being proscribed birth control is like buying a pair of shoes or a handbag.

Hey, where's the FMM crowd, you know, brad, M. Bouffant, NutellaOnToast? Guys, c'mon, join Susan on the stage, this is your moment to declare Mission Accomplished.I, for one, shall miss Ms. McArdle's musings, particularly on a day like this. Who else will report on the plight of Apple fanboys and fangirls waiting in line for the new version of their favorite gadget?